Is Cuba next? "I don't think we need [to take] any action," said President Donald Trump on Sunday. Without the regime of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and a steady supply of oil, "Cuba looks like it's ready to fall."

"I'm not going to talk to you about what our future steps are going to be," Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Meet the Press that same day. But at a press conference following the capture of Maduro in Venezuela on Saturday, he had said, "If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I'd be concerned."

"I don't think it's any mystery that we are not big fans of the Cuban regime, who, by the way, are the ones that were propping up Maduro," said Rubio on Sunday. No kidding.

"It was Cubans that guarded Maduro," he added. "He was not guarded by Venezuelan bodyguards. He had Cuban bodyguards."

The thought seems to be that, having orchestrated the downfall of the Venezuelan dictator, the Trump administration now stands ready to destabilize the Cuban regime and transition its governance. Or that the economic pain felt by Cuba will be intense enough that the regime will fall on its own.

"To keep the lights on and cars running, Cuba has long been dependent on Venezuelan oil supplies, for which it has exchanged security and medical personnel in a sympathetic contract with leftist allies in Caracas," notes The Washington Post. Now the unholy alliance is over, and the beast will be starved. But it's not the first time Cuba's experienced a cutoff. When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, the island experienced what's known as período especial, a time of severe economic depression that left lasting marks.

Other people are less confident that the Venezuela situation is going to destabilize Cuba to such a high degree. "Cutting off the oil deliveries is going to put a huge squeeze on the humanitarian situation" in Cuba, Juan Gonzalez, part of the Biden administration's national security staff, told the Post, "but I don't think the regime is going to cry uncle."

Meanwhile, in Venezuela, the transition has been bumpy. Delcy Rodríguez—the vice president since 2018—has been appointed leader, instead of the exiled María Corina Machado, the opposition leader who is widely regarded as having the true mandate of the people, or Edmundo González, whose presidential election victory in 2024 was stolen by Maduro.

"It's unclear whether [Delcy] Rodríguez will become a reformer who leads the country from Chavismo toward democracy or an authoritarian consolidator with American backing," wrote César Báez for Reason.

"Rodríguez will have little incentive to open up the country's political system. More than a dozen powerful officials and military figures have been, like Maduro, indicted in U.S. courts," reports The Atlantic's Michael Albertus. "They face dim prospects if they hand over power without securing guarantees of immunity. Their most logical move is to dig in—and publicly, that's exactly what they have done. Rodríguez has forcefully denounced the U.S. intervention and asserted that Maduro remains Venezuela's rightful leader. Other officials have circled the wagons."

HOLY COW

MINNESOTA VOTER FRAUD

This is the form used to vouch up to 8 voters on Election Day (for people that don’t have IDs).

If you read closely it says,

“Employees of residential facilities may vouch for an 👉UNLIMITED👈 number of facility residents.”

This is legal.

This is Minnesota law.

Which means that there *should* be a paper trail of every single one of these vouching forms.

How many persons serve as vouchers each election? What is the number of persons for each voucher? Do these vouchers show up every single election?

We need to begin submitting Data Practices Requests to the Minnesota Secretary of State.

This is a huge story.